A Map To Inclusion

This article was originally published at International Alert on 31 March, 2016. Republished with permission.

Over the last eight months, International Alert has been training young people from the deprived and marginalised suburb of Ettadhamen in Tunis to map their local area and the problems their community faces.

The neighbourhood is marked by poverty and high unemployment, and, like neighbouring Douar Hicher, is often described as a hotbed of radicalism. Our research has found that the social and urban inequalities to which young people in particular in these areas are subjected penetrates every aspect of their lives, leaving them feeling excluded and marginalised.

To help address this issue, Alert has been training young people in Ettadhamen to use OpenStreetMap, a global collaborative mapping tool updated by volunteers. The tool has never been used in Tunisia and provides an opportunity for communities to mark out their local neighbourhood, which doesn’t even exist on the likes of Google Maps.

Among those trained are many unemployed young graduates. The project not only offers them an alternative to crime, but also gives them confidence to believe they can make a positive change in their society. By marking areas that require basic services from the government, such as rubbish collection points, it has provided young people with a platform to meaningfully engage with authorities and request improvements to local services.

Gathering the data for the map has been a challenging process. Some people didn’t know the numbers of their own houses and not all street names had been officially registered. Initially, the local authorities were not very enthusiastic about the project. Some members of the community also didn’t understand what the young people were doing, questioning why they needed specific information about the neighbourhood. However, it has been a positive learning process and has enabled the young people to challenge the stigma associated with their neighbourhood and change their own daily realities.

The initiative is part of a wider project aimed at strengthening youth participation in Ettadhamen and Douar Hicher, launched in September 2015. By encouraging engagement between young people and local authorities, through OpenStreetMap and other activities, the project helps to give more meaning to the young people’s sense of citizenship and demonstrate that marginalisation is not inevitable.

International Alert was founded in 1986 to help people find peaceful solutions to conflict. Building on its early work in Sri Lanka, Uganda and the Philippines, International Alert now helps people find peaceful solutions to conflict in over 25 countries around the world. It is now one of the world’s leading peacebuilding organisations. Follow on Twitter: @intalert

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The European Journalism Centre (EJC) is an independent, international, non-profit institute dedicated to the highest standards in journalism, primarily through the further training of journalists and media professionals. Building on its extensive international network, the Centre operates as a facilitator and partner in a wide variety of training projects.